The Laura Cardinal Novels

by J. Carson Black

  “Nothing.” He slouched past her, but she could feel him lurking in the doorway. Todd had a reputation for keeping his mind on other people’s business, always looking for a way to ingratiate himself with the brass. “You have a good time in Bisbee?”

  The phone started ringing on the other end and she broke the connection. “’Good’ is not the way I’d describe it.”

  “The lieut kind of wondered why you didn’t come back with the techs.”

  So that was it. What, he thought she turned it into a vacation?

  One of the new rules Galaz had instituted was financial: He wanted to see a justification of every expense over a hundred dollars. This affected overnight stays. If at all possible, he wanted his detectives to drive back rather than stay the night.

  “I used my own money,” Laura said, mad at herself for letting Todd put her on the defensive.

  “Did you use your own time?”

  It was a parting shot; he was already out the door and halfway down the stairs. Todd had a habit of sniping at people and then running for cover. Still, she knew she’d have to smooth it over with Jerry Grimes, and he in turn would smooth it over with Galaz.

  She wasn’t going to worry about it. Jerry knew she got results. Maybe her methods were a little unorthodox, but that had always been the way she worked.

  Lieutenant Mike Galaz had been here for five months. Other than his watchful eye over the budget, he was an unknown factor, generally considered to be a good (if political) administrator who left the sergeants to run their own squads.

  His first official act was to institute weekly briefings where everyone in the criminal investigation division got together and discussed their cases. Galaz himself didn’t take part, but stood at the front of the room listening intently. At the end of each meeting, he’d give a short speech about the importance of their mission, ending with a phrase he must have picked up from a TV show: “Let’s go, people!”

  Laura punched in Detective Endicott’s number, but got his voice mail—gone for the day. She looked at the clock: seven-thirty. Next she called Cary Statler’s uncle. No answer, no machine.

  Where was Cary Statler?

  It nagged at her, even though Laura’s instincts told her he wasn’t Jessica Parris’s killer. Strangling a person face-to-face showed rage, which would fit a domestic abusive relationship. But Laura worked under the assumption that the killer was older. Dressing her like that didn’t fit with a boyfriend-girlfriend relationship. And the way he’d cleaned her up; so careful not to leave evidence. It was possible Cary could have done all that, but unlikely.

  Still, she wished she knew where he was.

  When she looked at the clock again it was eleven thirty. By this time there were stacks of papers all over her desk, some on chairs, some on the floor. Transcripts of interviews, autopsy results, her own notes torn from a yellow legal pad. A sea of information, including a printout of City Park drawn to scale. She had looked it over three times now, worrying that she was missing something. Now she was staring at it without really seeing it.

  Time to go home, and sleep—if she could.

  14

  The 4Runner’s tires rumbled over the cattle guard marking the entrance to the Bosque Escondido Guest Ranch. The storm had gone, leaving a few luminous clouds and a full moon that turned the dirt road white, a chalk line through the desert.

  The moment she drove onto the Bosque Escondido, Laura felt something give in her chest. She loved her job, but it wasn’t natural to have to look at so much ugliness day after day. The evils people visited on one another, the unspeakable cruelties she saw almost daily, had the cumulative effect of a house of cards—one insult building up on top of another until over time the whole thing threatened to come crashing down. She was almost to that point now. She could feel it, tiny cracks running through the wall she’d put up.

  Structural damage.

  Tonight she had nothing to go home to except the flat-roofed Mexican adobe in the middle of the desert.

  Normally she liked being way out at the edge of Tucson, in a shallow indentation in the desert where she could not even see the city lights, but tonight she didn’t want to walk into an empty house. Putting it off, she drove past the main ranch house, the guest bungalows, the cantina, then turned onto the short loop road that took her by Tom’s place—a tin-roofed adobe with a screened-in porch. The place was dark—no welcoming light. She wondered if he was thinking about her.

  Right now—at this moment—she wanted him to move in and never leave. It was almost physical, this need she had. She wondered how she had managed to go so long without someone. When you had someone, everything was better. You had a mate in a world where most people had mates. You went more places, and there was an aura to being in love, like you had God’s blessing. People saw you differently.

  She thought of all the places she wanted to go with him. Just overnight stays because she worked so much. But good times. Good times piling up one on top of the other, photos in an album.

  She wished he was here right now. She wanted him to hold her, she wanted him to make love to her, see if that could wipe out the image of Jessica Parris, dehumanized and left like a piece of meat on display in a shabby band shell in a concrete park. Obliterate it from her mind. Tape over it with something good.

  She didn’t want to be logical and look at the long run. She wanted them to live together. Hell, if he asked, she’d go to Las Vegas with him right now. Why not just abdicate responsibility, do something for the pure thrill of it? Like getting married to a man you’ve only known for a few months.

  The two of them against the world.

  “Good thing you’re in New Mexico,” she said to the dark house.

  She followed the road back into the desert, the road dipping down into the Agua Verde wash and out again. A quarter-mile to her place. Just where the dirt lane right-angled, there it was, Mi Nidito. It looked like a hacienda in Mexico, white-washed by the moonlight, almost hidden by mature mesquite trees.

  Mi Nidito. My little nest. Laura didn’t know who’d named it, spelling it out in Mexican tile by the door. Someone else who had lived here for a while? She saw it as her house, but she knew it wasn’t, that someday she’d have to move on.

  Stepping out of the car, she was careful to avoid the cow pies; the ranch cows went where they pleased. She did step on plenty of mesquite bean pods, though, soft, yielding crescents on this hot humid night. The old metal gate creaked as she went through.

  Laura was serenaded by cow-like crying—spadefoot toads. She smiled, remembering how her mother had told her that the noise, which always came after a summer storm, came from rabbits who’d lost their homes. Now she knew better, but she loved the sentimentality—the Irishness—of her mother’s story better.

  She walked up onto the deep porch and stopped to listen, hoping the bobcat kittens who lived on her roof were back. They hadn’t been around for at least a week.

  The place was quiet.

  She had it all to herself.

  Looking at the cemetery and sky was like peering through a sheet of bright yellow cellophane. Laura knew where she was: the Mexican cemetery on Fort Lowell Road down the street from her parents’ house. The cemetery belonged to los fuertenos, the community of Mexicans and Mexican-Americans which grew up around the abandoned fort on the rich bottomland of the Rillito River. Laura used to walk by here every day on the way to school.

  The graveyard was both stark and beautiful, an anthill riddled with plaster and iron crosses, statues, and heaps of flowers both plastic and real. Graves alternated with cactus and creosote bushes.

  Julie Marr was standing outside the wire fence by the curve in the road, looking at Laura. From where she was, Laura could see the old car coming. The picture in the paper was black and white, but in this bright yellow world she knew the car was orange over ivory. She knew the make, too, thanks to her experience with the Highway Patrol: a 1955 Chevrolet Bel Air sedan. Primer on the rocker panels, a crucifix hangin
g from the rear-view.

  Laura sat up in bed, her pulse hammering in her ears. Her dreams had always been vivid and easily recalled. In recent years, she’d had one recurring dream—going home to show off her DPS Crown Vic to her parents, just a few weeks out of the Academy. It always relieved her to see that they’d come through the months of intensive care, physical therapy, and countless operations with flying colors. Dad didn’t walk so well, and Mom was forgetful. But they’d made it through.

  Except it wasn’t true.

  Laura’s mind veered back to the dream. She remembered how her parents had freaked out when they heard about Julie Marr on the news. “But for the grace of God, it could have been her” she’d overheard her father say about his only child. Julie’s kidnapping had affected Laura’s mother strangely, leading to an obsession with true crime—the grislier the better. It sent her to a journal-writing group, which she attended faithfully, and a year or so later she started receiving letters with New York postmarks. Laura’s mom never told her what was in them, but she guessed they were rejection letters. Maybe writing about crime was Alice Cardinal’s way of facing her fears.

  The car—the 1955 Bel Air—had been stolen specifically for the purpose of abducting Julie Marr on that terrible spring day in 1987. Julie had never been found, but there had been blood evidence in the car.

  Lots of it. That didn’t show up in black and white either.

  She got on the road early the next morning. The faded moon hung in a clear indigo sky as she drove off the ranch and through the little town of Vail, over the railroad tracks and onto the freeway going east toward Bisbee. Ahead, there was a blush over the far mountains. Julie Marr’s death faded from her mind like an old photograph in a scrapbook.

  15

  OFFICER NOONE INVESTIGATES

  Randall Noone—he hated the name “Randy”; people might as well just go ahead and call him “Horny”—parked a little way down and walked up to the turnout on West Boulevard. He’d just started his shift and wanted to check on the tire tracks and see if the same vehicle had come back. He was sure those tire tracks had something to do with Jessica Parris’s death. Otherwise, why would Laura Cardinal bother to take casts of them?

  At seven in the morning, this part of the canyon was still deep in shadow. There was a hushed feeling to the air, which was actually cool for once, thanks to the overnight rain.

  His favorite time of day.

  Even though he’d enjoyed the thrill of working nights, he never could adjust completely to the night. Working the day shift in Bisbee wasn’t big on excitement, but he enjoyed talking to folks—the place was like Mayberry. He was good at giving speeding tickets, too; he made people feel so good about getting a ticket that they were practically thanking him before he was done. Randall thought that if he’d really wanted excitement, he could have joined up with the sheriff’s department, which had become a war zone in the last few years. With the Feds clamping down on the border crossings in California and Texas, Arizona was a hotbed for illegal aliens. One of his friends in the sheriff’s department had personally discovered three decomposing bodies in the desert just this year, and had nearly been run down during a routine traffic stop when a vanload of illegals jumped out after putting the van into reverse, right at him.

  Nope, he liked Mayberry just fine. Especially with the baby on the way. He and Marcie had picked out the name already: Justin. A good strong name.

  The only bad thing about days—Heather Duffy was on days, too.

  The Duffy trouble began when his wife had a cold and couldn’t make it to the year-end party. After downing five Tabasco shooters, he’d ended up making out with Duffy, and she’d never let him forget it. She sank her teeth into him like a gila monster. When one of them clamped onto your fingers, you might as well get used to having a new clothing accessory.

  He reached the yellow tape and looked at the area. He’d made a mental note of exactly how it had looked the night before and was happy to see that the area had not been disturbed.

  Glancing back at the Parris house, he said a brief prayer. Man, that was tough—imagine losing your kid like that. The chief had mentioned a possible Internet connection. That was bad stuff, the way some freak with a computer could reach right into your house and lure your kid right out the front door. When Justin grew up, he’d have to watch him like a hawk. He’d get AOL. They had safeguards for stuff just like that.

  He walked across the road to look at the other turnout. A raven flew over, making a nut-cracking noise deep in its throat.

  As he reached the road’s shoulder, the smell hit him.

  He realized that off and on yesterday afternoon he had smelled it, too, had thought it was coming from the dumpster. But it wasn’t really a garbage smell.

  It was a death smell.

  He looked up and down the road, but saw nothing. Probably some poor animal had been hit by a car and crawled into the underbrush.

  A thick screen of trees ran along the east side of the road. His Uncle Nate called them cancer trees because they spread like a fast-moving tumor. He stepped to the side of the road and peered between the trunks. No animal that he could see, but there was something—a solid patch of gray through the trees. Couldn’t be more than ten feet from where he stood.

  An abandoned shed? No, it had a pitched roof. It looked like a little cabin. Suddenly he remembered something else Uncle Nate told him, that there were some old tourist cabins around here from the twenties, back when this road was the highway through town.

  As he recalled, it had an Indian name. Cochise? No. Geronimo. The Geronimo Tourist Camp.

  Randall Noone squinted at the shack, holding the tree limbs away from his face. The trees made him feel claustrophobic. They gave off a cloying odor, like peanut butter, that mixed with the death smell and made his stomach queasy. Breathing through his mouth, he made his way through the underbrush, the limbs springing back like boomerangs when he let go of them, until he was standing outside the shack.

  The doors and windows to the cabin were gone, leaving it open to the elements—just a shell with a rusted stove pipe lying in the corner across floorboards pretty much rotted through. Place couldn’t be much bigger than a roomy bathroom.

  He noticed another ghostly square to his left, maybe fifteen feet away, and went to investigate.

  This cabin looked like a kids’ hangout—there was a candle, an old rug, throw pillows, rolling papers, and a boom box. A faint odor of pot.

  This was interesting.

  He spotted another cabin, this one farthest away from the road and backed up against the hill. He picked his way along a faint trail littered with junk—a roll of hog wire, broken glass, a sink with a hole in it.

  Darker here, shadowed by the ridge and oak trees. Damp. The raven flew to an oak and chortled at him as he approached the open doorway.

  The stench hit him with almost physical force.

  He stepped back, his mind reeling. Something dead here. Steeling himself, he breathed through his mouth before peering in.

  At first he thought it was just a pile of black rags. No, it was jeans and a T-shirt. Naturally, his gaze wandered up the t-shirt toward the face.

  His disbelieving eyes registered the green fright mask for just an instant before he reeled backwards out the door, gulping for air.

  Officer Randall Noone found himself on all fours, the scrambled eggs Marcie cooked for his breakfast ending up in a steaming pile on the grass.

  16

  “What do you think?” Laura asked Victor. Early afternoon now, and the crime lab techs had finished collecting evidence and the ME’s people were on their way to remove the body of Cary Statler.

  Victor sighed. “Whoever killed Jessica probably killed him.”

  Laura knew what he was thinking: more trouble. Just seven hours ago he’d been making arrangements for a studio portrait of his family, including his new daughter, and now he’d been dragged back here in this heat to look at the corpse of Cary Statler, which in h
is view only complicated the case.

  Laura agreed with Victor that there was a high probability that Jessica and Cary had been attacked at the same time. With a body this far gone, it would be impossible to fix a definitive time of death, but Laura didn’t believe in coincidences. The fact that Cary Statler and Jessica Parris had both been victims of homicide was just too big a coincidence to ignore.

  Detective Holland said, “He wanted the girl and this poor sad bastard was in the way. So he bashed him in the head and took the girl where he could have his fun without being rushed.”

  Laura kept her gaze on Statler, although it was hard to do. He was riddled with maggots. One eye had been pecked out, and several fingers had been torn from one hand, probably dragged off by animals. It was fortunate he had ID on him, because skin slippage and a hardening and darkening of his complexion made his features unrecognizable—his face was marbled lime-green and black.

  But Laura knew who it was the moment she saw the Megadeth tee and the yellow pineapple hair.

  She straightened up, feeling the twinge in her back. The shade, which had stayed with them most of the day, had given way to full sunlight coming in through the southern window. The air was stifling; the stench almost unbearable. Victor and Buddy had shared dabs of Victor’s jar of mentholatum to block out the smell, but Laura had made it a policy not to use the stuff, since she knew from experience that the stink would linger in the mentholatum long after she had left the scene. She breathed through her mouth, but could still feel death lying on the membranes on her tongue, in her nostrils, on her skin.

  Victor cocked his head. “Man, that was some hit he took.” The force of the blow had broken Cary Statler’s neck, even though the wound itself had been higher up to the side of the head. One blow. It had come close to separating his head from his body.